From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns contains 36 overviews of issues in bioethics of high public interest, such as abortion, health care reform, human and sports enhancement, organ transplantation, personalized medicine, medical error, and stem cells. The chapters, written by leading ethicists, are nonpartisan, presenting reasonable considerations from various perspectives that are grounded in good scientific and ethical facts. They each include recent news stories, clickable experts to contact, linked resources, and (where available) recent legislation and campaign positions. Greater detail on how to use the book is in the introduction. The three framing essays offer valuable insights into the historical and increasing relevance of bioethics to public policy.

November 2007

This report examines the debates over patenting biomedical research and treatments, focusing on how those debates play out in the patenting of inventions involving genes and stem cells and the patenting of drugs for HIV/AIDS. It concludes with a comprehensive review of laws, policies, and practices that aim to preserve or create incentives for innovation in biomedicine, promote further research, and provide access to treatments.

This report from The Hastings Center explores the ethical dimensions of efforts to make health care safer and better through continuous improvements in patient care, with special attention to the relationship between everyday QI activities and the ethical rules and regulations governing human subjects research. It offers practical recommendations for ensuring that QI meets ethical requirements, proposes a cooperative effort by public and private entities to develop clearer guidance on the relationship between ethical oversight of QI and human subjects research regulations, and makes other policy recommendations aimed at promoting safety and quality in health care through the ethical conduct of QI.

This report contains 10 essays that present a synoptic overview of the most important developments in end-of-life decisionmaking and take stock of their successes or failures. The essays also provide ideas for a new strategy to improve care for the dying, and examples of ways to reevaluate and improve advance directives and surrogate decisionmaking.

This four-part report aims to help readers understand what geneticists believe they have discovered about how genetic differences are related to observed, or "phenotypic," differences. It also helps readers contemplate what those findings might mean for how we think about who we are.

In 2000, the Institute of Medicine reported that as many as 98,000 Americans die each year as the result of medical error. This special report on patient safety seeks to foster clearer and better informed discussion of the ethical concerns that are integral to the development and implementation of effective policies that would address the problem of medical error.

This report discusses how new techniques at the intersection of reproductive medicine and genetics raise complex ethical questions that should not be resolved by a largely unregulated market. Rather, they demand policies that have been publicly and transparently developed.

This report looks at issues of social justice, access, and public policy in hospice and palliative care. As it examines the issues from the perspectives of social justice and fairness, it also recommends ways in which the definition of hospice can be expanded to include more Americans for a longer period of time than simply the days or months shortly before death.

Serving on a hospital's board of trustees requires confronting a variety of difficult ethical problems that are almost never discussed and rarely recognized even by trustees themselves. This supplement presents trustees' own views of their work and develops a framework for doing that work well.

This supplement presents a cross-cultural dialogue about the fundamental professional values of medicine that shape medical practice, teaching, and research in China and the United States. Articles by Chinese and American scholars who participated in a four-day conference in Beijing in 1998 explore the ethical traditions of these two very different cultures. While the history of the two countries differs significantly, these essays reveal that physicians in the United States and China share many core ethical values that define and order their professional lives.

Prenatal screening for "disabling" genetic traits seems self-evidently good to some people. But the disability rights movement has criticized such testing as morally problematic and driven by misinformation about what it is like to live with a disability. This supplement, the report of a two-year project at The Hastings Center, explores concerns about the hurtful message that testing may send, the problematic attitudes toward children that prenatal testing can foster, and the way such testing can allow an evaluation of traits to stand in for an evaluation of persons. It offers recommendations regarding genetic counseling and educating people about disabilities to help inform public conversation about what genetic tests we might permit and which we should not employ.

A working group assembled by The Hastings Center explores the structure of health care delivery in managed care, ponders its potential effect on patient care, and queries the market orientation of managed care. It notes problems with the current structure and shows how these problems necessitate further study of organizational and systemic issues in health care delivery.

An increasing number of biotechnologies offer ways of "enhancing" people. Examples are cosmetic surgery, gene therapies, performance drugs, and psychopharmacological agents such as antidepressants. This supplement tries to clear the conceptual ground for assessing such enhancements. It considers a range of possible moral concerns and from these draws several lessons for public policy.